The world outside my window looked peaceful. That kind of peace you only find in paintings — frozen, staged, and utterly false.
Beyond the Velloran estate walls, the realm of Aetherra stretched like a tapestry painted in elemental brushstrokes. Mountains shimmered with veins of fire, where the Pyreborn clans carved fortresses into molten stone. To the north, the Frostlands held silver cities suspended in ice, ruled by bloodlines with magic colder than death. The east brimmed with wind-battered monoliths and sky palaces that never touched ground. Waterborne traders ruled the coastlines with ships that bent tides like string.
And in the center of it all — the old kingdoms, clawing for relevance in a world that had outgrown them.
We were one of those.
The once-proud house of Velloran — now a pale flicker in the firestorm of power.
A house of strength. Of grit and stubborn marrow. At least, that's what the book said. All I saw was a crumbling estate held together by silence and shame.
I leaned on the balcony rail, letting the cold bite through Edwin's skin. Three days. That's all I had before the Awakening Ceremony. The moment when bloodlines either sparked to life or sputtered into irrelevance.
And Edwin… he sputtered.
He awakened nothing. No elemental inheritance. No blessing. Just an empty, echoing self.
And now that self was mine.
But there was something I had to do — anything. I'm not about to just die again when I've barely even lived this second life of mine. I know that my past life wasn't anything special, but if I survive here, then perhaps I too could...
Cracking my head for answers on how to navigate this incoming storm, I remembered something — something the other characters in the novel never paid enough attention to.
A name. A man.
Mirek Vayne.
He was introduced late in Rise of the Inhuman King. An assassin with a blade like shadow that fought against the hero in the later chapters. He didn't fight with any elemental force. He didn't need a bloodline. Because he had something much darker.
He had made a contract with a devil — the Dark King Erebus, who oversees a portion of the underworld.
In the later chapters, during one of his missions, he fought against the hero. Both sides suffered losses, but he still managed to escape — proving just how powerful he was.
Now I am going to have to make a contract with this devil. I have to. I have no choice if I want to survive in this forsaken world.
If I remember correctly, there are three things I need before I start the ritual.
First, blood. Well, that's already sorted. My blood should be able to do the trick.
Second, the Dark King's elemental chant. Funny enough, I know that by heart from reading the book.
Now, for the last thing I have to get is the...
Now, the last thing I have to get is the Enchantment Sigil — the mark that binds the pact.
In the book, Mirek Vayne had stumbled upon it in the ruins beneath the Obsidian Archives, an ancient library sealed by the old kings after the War of Sundering. But I didn't have time to cross continents or dive into catacombs.
Fortunately, the story hinted that the sigil itself had been replicated once — by a rogue scholar turned assassin who had studied under Mirek. He was known as Shadow, a name that drifted through the underground like smoke.
And Edwin — the real Edwin — had once crossed paths with him, they both attended the same clandestine lecture in the city of Thorneveil, where forbidden magic was traded in hushed tones and hidden scrolls. That memory, buried deep in this body's mind, was mine now.
Shadow had the sigil. He knew how to draw it. How to etch it in blood.
And if I could track down his old trail — maybe an informant, a symbol carved somewhere in the back alleys of Thorneveil — then I could recreate it myself. I had two days to do it.
Two days to prepare a ritual the world had tried to erase.
Two days before the ceremony that would reveal me as either something... or nothing.
I turned from the balcony, the cold wind hissing like a warning in my ears. Edwin's body shivered, but my mind was burning.
No one here believed in devils anymore. The old gods had faded, the dark pacts were fairy tales told to scare apprentices and nobles' sons. But I had read the book. I knew what the others didn't. And I knew how to cheat fate.
I stepped back into the gloom of my chamber, eyes narrowing on the stack of old scrolls and tattered pages I had gathered from the estate's forgotten wing. Dusty records. Broken glyphs. A chance.
"I'm not going to die like a useless heir with no spark," I muttered. "If no flame awakens in me… then I will summon one from the dark."
Tomorrow, I leave for Thorneveil. Alone.
And when I return... I'll no longer be just Edwin.